Strategic Objectives

In support of the strategic vision, the following five objectives have been set for this Application Strategy.

1. Increase the Adoption of COTS^{Footnote 2}  Applications

While custom developed applications are sometimes necessary to meet the specific business or operational needs of Defence, they are typically characterized by higher development and maintenance costs and shorter lifespans than comparable COTS applications. Historically, Defence has chosen to in-house develop many of its applications resulting in a portfolio that is approximately 50-60% custom.^{Footnote 3}  This strategy aims to decrease the percentage of custom application to approximately 30% over the next five years by following a ‘buy before build’ approach in selecting application solutions.

2. Reduce Duplication of Functionality

The distributed nature of DND/CAF application delivery has resulted in a portfolio where some capabilities are enabled by multiple applications. Consequently, it is not uncommon to discover different Defence organizations using different applications to perform the same functions. Not only is the duplication of functionality costly to build and maintain it also poses significant challenges to the delivery of integrated and interoperable Defence capabilities. This strategy aims to reduce the current ‘one-to-many’ capability to application ratio to a ‘one-to-one’ ratio with a focus on crossfunctional capabilities used across the Defence enterprise. This objective will have the collateral effect of reducing the total number of applications as well as the number of underlying technologies.

3. Reduce Integration Complexity

Integration complexity is a major cost driver for both application development and application support. Historically Defence applications were developed with many interfaces to facilitate interactions with many other applications. These interfaces can be very challenging to design and any subsequent changes often result in unforeseen effects to other applications. This strategy aims to reduce integration complexity by:

• Reducing the use of legacy point-to-point integration in favour of more modern designs that align with current industry and technology trends; and
• Establishing guiding principles that will help converge on technologies and standards during the design phase.

4. Improve Application Portfolio Management Data Quality

Application Portfolio Management is a framework for managing the suite of Defence applications. It uses a tool^{Footnote 4}  to maintain an inventory of Defence applications including data and metrics on their business or operational value and technical health and processes to use this information to support application investment decisions. Defence adopted Application Portfolio Management as a Defence Renewal initiative (Ref H) and the goal of this strategy is to enhance its maturity by improving its data quality such that it can be more reliably used for decision support.

5. Leverage External Expertise and Services

There are many instances where the nature of the business of Defence requires unique solutions. However, as a result of advances in technology and commercial security practices there are instances where external stakeholders have both the expertise and solutions necessary to meet our needs. This strategy aims to identify and pursue opportunities to leverage such external expertise and to consider the use of external service providers when possible.